'Lived experience': finally, a disability reporter who has a disability

The ABC’s national disability affairs reporter, Nas Campanella, says the stories she covers never cease to shock her and can even make her teary.

“In some ways I’m not surprised that certain things are happening because they happened to me or people I know, but it never stops shocking me,” Campanella says of her first year in the role, which included historic live crosses from the disability royal commission.

“I’d be lying if I said it hadn’t made me a little teary at times but I think that’s a good thing because it means I have still got that empathy. You need to be affected by these things if you’re surrounded by them constantly.”

Campanella is coming up to 10 years at the national broadcaster and has embraced her “second dream job” after seven and a half years as Triple J’s newsreader.

She was born sighted but at six months of age blood vessels burst in the back of her eyes, which detached her retinas and left her blind. She also has a muscle condition, Charcot-Marie-Tooth neuropathy or CMT, which means she is unable to read braille. She uses aural technology to read.

“I was thrilled when I was asked to do the disability round because having a person with lived experience in that position meant there was a level of empathy and understanding of those issues that hadn’t been there before,” she says.

“Any journalist here could cover these issues, and do it well, but obviously there’s a level of understanding and contacts with the community that I had. And I really wanted to change the way disability issues are portrayed. I wanted to put people at the centre and I wanted to give people with a disability the opportunity to tell their own stories.”

Hired from a competitive field of young journalists in 2011, Campanella was the first blind cadet at the ABC.

Her high-profile role as a television reporter gave viewers something they had never experienced: a person with a disability reporting on disability issues.

“I have had an overwhelmingly positive reaction to being on television,” Campanella says. “Most people are really excited, most people are really pleased that someone is on TV who has eyes that don’t look like everyone else’s. Now people in the community are seeing themselves reflected.”

After four years of unpaid work and a host of prospective employers who saw her blindness as an impediment, Campanella says the ABC recruiters saw her simply as a person with potential.

“I think for me that was what was great,” she says. “I was seen for my skills, my experience and my dedication to the industry.”

The 32-year-old, who married fellow ABC journalist Thomas Oriti in 2018, says reporting of people with a disability has been sensationalist: it’s either a “pity party” or “inspiration porn”, and she wants to change that.

According to the latest available ABC figures, content makers with a disability make up 4.7% of staff at the ABC, content makers who are culturally and linguistically diverse make up 9.4% and Indigenous content makers represent 2.8%.

The ABC – and the media industry more widely – has a long way to go in representing diversity in all its forms, in particular ethnic diversity on the free-to-air TV networks where presenters are disproportionately white compared with the wider population.

The ABC news executive Gavin Fang is tasked with making the ABC news division “look and sound like Australia” and oversees a raft of programs to improve diversity, including Indigenous internships and partnerships with universities. The cadet program, which was paused this year due to Covid-19, is being overhauled to attract more diverse applicants.

While the flagship TV shows News Breakfast, 7.30, Insiders, Q+A and The Drum are hosted by white presenters, the diversity of reporters and presenters on ABC TV is increasing.

But the days of everyone looking like Hamish Macdonald and Leigh Sales are over.

There are familiar non-white faces on ABC TV now, such as the presenters Jeremy Fernandez, Stan Grant, Miriam Corowa, Karina Carvalho, Fauziah Ibrahim and Mariam Saab, the news reporter Giselle Wakatama, the finance reporter David Chau, the Indigenous affairs reporter Isabella Higgins and the ABC’s first Indigenous foreign correspondent, Bridget Brennan.

In December ABC News Breakfast moved to its summer hosts and the journalist Iskhandar Razak, who was born in Singapore and grew up in Adelaide, joined Madeleine Morris on the couch as co-host.

Fang says it’s important to nurture talent like Razak to bring an end to the whitewash that is the key presenting roles.

Across the ABC a talent management project team was formed to look at how the broadcaster can attract, develop and retain on-air talent.

“We think having more diverse voices and perspectives in our journalism makes our stories better and makes them more relevant to the broadest audience,” Fang told Guardian Australia. “It’s about being more representative and to do better journalism we need to hear from more people. We have goals around workforce diversity and people with a disability.”

During the Melbourne lockdown in 2020, audiences became familiar with the young Victorian reporter Elias Clure who was a constant, doing live crosses on the ABC news channel.

Of African-American heritage, Clure grew up in Australia and started, like Campanella, as an ABC cadet who wanted to change community attitudes.

“I identify strongly with the ABC’s values but I also believe strongly its flagship programs can be more diverse,” Clure wrote earlier this year. “My lived experience can offer a unique perspective.”

In June Clure covered the Black Lives Matter protests in Melbourne and wrote about the impact on him and the racism he still experiences.

“Constantly seeing white people report on nuanced issues of race is exhausting,” he says. “It’s not that white journalists can’t do a great job, they can, I just don’t think they can bring as comprehensive an understanding.

“It also exposes a glaring lack of diversity in news coverage across the board, although the ABC is trying to address this with a Diversity Action Plan for its workforce and content to better reflect the entire Australian community.”